Coal and Consequences, Five Days in Katowice … As the bus nears downtown Katowice .. a coal mine. There are fourteen in Katowice, although only two remain active.
… Many Katowicians still burn coal for heat.
… Spodek .. it look like a crashed flying saucer.
… a “rule book” for the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement.
… signatory nations can ignore it without any direct consequences.
… the most important annual conference on the most important perennial threat to my generation.
… Climate change is running; we were walking; we are now standing.
… Marcin Krupa .. Andres Duda .. Poland has enough coal reserves for over two hundred years
… “Gilets Jaunes” movement in France .. Habermas .. modern democracy is the interflux of communication between the political and civil society
… Arnold Schwarzenegger .. “I wish I could be the Terminator in real life and travel back in time to stop all fossil fuels from being discovered,” he says. Then he leaves.
… Sir David Attenborough .. “the destruction of our civilization is on the horizon”
… Katowice has coal.
… Duda .. visits a coal mine in Brzeszcze .. “Please, don’t worry. As long as I am the president, I won’t allow anyone to murder the Polish mining.”
… “Sustainaclaus”
… the pointlessness of the meeting
… CO2 emissions rose 2.7 percent in 2018—the largest increase in the past seven years.
… “My own Germany was reunified because of the bravery of the people in Poland.”
… a conference about limiting change rather than increasing it
/18-12-17

new neural network design could overcome big challenges in AI … borrowed equations from calculus to redesign the core machinery of deep learning so it can model continuous processes
… Neural nets
… The discrete layers are what keep it from effectively modeling continuous processes
… it replaces the layers with calculus equations
… there are no more nodes and connections, just one continuous slab of computation
… ODE for “ordinary differential equations”
… The new method allows you to specify your desired accuracy first, and it will find the most efficient way to train itself within that margin of error.
/18-12-17

wealthiest people .. are getting ready for the crackup of civilization … C.E.O. of Reddit .. arranged to have laser eye surgery .. not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, .. he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made .. getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass
… in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City
… “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.”
… Bitcoin and cryptocurrency
… W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”
… contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus
… “How to Eat a Pine Tree to Survive”
… “Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?”
… New Zealand, he discovered, is a favored refuge
… walls are fitted with L.E.D. “windows” that show a live video of the prairie above the silo
… One prospective resident from New York City wanted video of Central Park. “All four seasons, day and night,” Menosky said. “She wanted the sounds, the taxis and the honking horns.”
/18-12-17

Harari, Youval Noah
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
… We flesh-and-body mortals must take full responsibility for whatever we do - or don't do.
… Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.
… So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general- purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.
… In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour some grown- up walks in, and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt.
/18-11-30/18-12-09

Attenborough .. in Katowice … "Right now, we're facing a man-made disaster of global scale," Attenborough told delegates from almost 200 nations. "Our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change. If we don't take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon."
… "Leaders of the world, you must lead," Attenborough concluded. "The continuation of our civilizations and the natural world upon which we depend is in your hands."
/18-12-07

neurons .. representing the passage of time … lateral entorhinal cortex, or L.E.C.
… the neurons in the L.E.C. are creating “timestamps” that record the order of unfolding events.
… It’s encoding ongoing experience.
… Take the same route to work every day, and the trips may blur in your mind.
… the two inputs “are mixed together,” a memory acquires a where and a when.
… our brains must have something like a “sense” of time
… “time” isn’t an absolute thing that our brains can “track” or “measure”; it’s more like an organizational system for making sense of change
… (Helpfully, physicists suggest that time may be an illusion.)
/18-12-07

neuroscience … IBM’s Jeopardy winning computer Watson is a serious threat
… the advance of AI seems to pose a cultural threat
… Nobel Prize .. neuroscientists
… the human brain doesn’t work the way conscious experience suggests at all. Instead it operates to deliver human achievements in the way IBM’s Watson does. Thoughts with meaning have no more role in the human brain than in artificial intelligence.
… belief/desire pairings somewhere in our brains
… information about means
… we have an innate mind-reading ability more powerful than other primates. .. to track other people’s actions
… fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies have localized a brain region that delivers this mind-reading ability.
… powerful mind reading for the cooperation and collaboration that resulted in Hominin genus’s rapid ascent
… the theory of mind .. has no basis in what neuroscience tell us about how the brain works
… how brains record and store the information we mistakenly describe as beliefs about the world in which we find ourselves.
… It’s not giving the neural circuits content, treating them as containing statements about where the rat is. Experimenters decode firing patterns. Rats don’t. They ‘re just driven by them.
… What makes some neural firings into location-recorders and other firings into odor-recorders is just their place in the causal chain, the pathway to further behavior.
Rats choose among alternative pathways as a result of neural firings produced by previous experience.
But it’s not because these neuron circuits contain statements about anything. The neurons don’t represent to the rat the way it’s world is arranged. So they don’t work any thing like the way beliefs have to work, pairing up with desires via shred content about means and ends.
… physiological identities between the structure of rat and human brains
… ever since Freud psychologists have diagnosed the illusions, delusions and confabulations in the mind
… The theory of mind is just another one of these illusions, useful for survival and success in the Pleistocene
… our brains the neural circuits neither have nor need content to do their jobs
… Watson may beat us at Jeopardy, but we are convinced we have something AI will always lack: We are agents in the world, whose decisions, choices, actions are made meaningful by the content of the belief/desire pairings that bring them about. But what if the theory of mind that underwrites our distinctiveness is build on sand, is just another useful illusion foisted upon us by the Darwinian processes that got us here? Then it will turn out that neuroscience is a far greater threat to human distinctiveness than AI will ever be.
/18-11-30

Poland bans the publication of polls just before elections. … Tomatoes (in Polish, POmidory) are code for the Civic Platform (PO), a centre-right party;
red beetroots signify the Left Democratic Alliance.
… Most countries also ban electioneering on election day itself. Such embargoes are a joke.
… Poles have merrily tweeted about the “prices” of “products” that sound suspiciously like political parties since at least 2011. “PIStachios”
… Banning pre-election polls makes access to information less equal. Parties and big firms can pay for private surveys. Astute voters can sift for credible data via foreign websites or the betting markets. Other voters are unlikely to do any of these things.
In the absence of reputable polls, bogus ones proliferate and mislead. Lifting the ban and letting pollsters poll seems wiser, and not just in Poland.
/18-11-30

Driverless Car … Waymo .. Under a new name, the Google sibling plans to methodically build a futuristic rival to Uber and Lyft
… early December
… a test group of 400 volunteer families who have been riding Waymos for more than a year
… After all, there will still be some backup drivers, customers will have to wait to join, it will only operate in a tiny geographic area with ideal driving conditions, and it’s still years away from being a profitable, stand-alone business.
… 62,000 plug-in hybrid Pacifica minivans and 20,000 fully-electric I-Pace SUVs
… The age-old guessing game of how long it will take for cars to drive themselves has come to an end. The better question now: How long will it take them to reach me?
/18-11-21